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Today we released a new version of the FSC QGIS Plugin (version 3.2.0 released 27th Feburary 2019). This feels like a real milestone for the FSC QGIS Plugin for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's packed with new features including the ability to handle Irish as well as British grid references, the ability to link directly to a Recorder 6 database as a source for the Biological Records tool, the addition of a new 'Add Grid Refs to layers' tool and many more. Secondly the release is a collaborative effort with a major contribution, on the Recorder 6 feature, from Ian Carle of the Hertfordshire Environmental Records Centre. Thirdly we have announced new governanace arrangements for this open source project into the future.

FSC Identikit is an open-source platform for building online ID resources, including multi-access keys, driven by spreadsheets of taxonomic/morphological knowledge. 2018 has been a year of intensive development of Identikit and Esmée Fairbairn’s support has enabled us to completely restructure the software ‘under the hood’ to add the capacity to deliver ID resources in the field – even where an internet connection is not available.

The FSC QGIS Plugin has been helping UK biological recorders to visualise and analyse their records since November 2014. FSC BioLinks will provide ongoing support for the plugin until, at least, the end of 2022. We want to hear your ideas about how we can improve and extend the functionality of the plugin to make it even more useful to you. Do you have ideas? However trivial or outlandish you think they are, we want to hear them. There's every chance that the thing you've always wanted QGIS to do, as a biological recorder, could become part of the next major release of the FSC QGIS plugin.

Guest blog by Siiri Hubbard and Nigel Kelly. Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey (1851-1931), was an American librarian, entrepreneur, womaniser, spelling reformer and inventor of a decimal-based system for the organisation of knowledge in libraries. He divided all knowledge into ten broad subject areas, such as science 500-599; divided each of those areas into ten, such as animals 590-599; divided each of those into ten, such as 598 birds; and so on, such as 598.9 raptors. Whether it’s books, reports or cdROMs, you can assign them a Dewey number, and all the items on similar subjects in your library and its catalogue come together. As the meerkat (599.742) says, “simples”.

Britain’s Spiders – A field guide by Lawrence Bee, Geoff Oxford and Helen Smith is a new book from the excellent WILDGuides stable, published in association with the British Arachnological Society. This book will likely fuel a revolution in spider identification in the UK that I believe is already underway. In this blog I will review the new book, but more than that I want to describe what it offers within the context of how people are learning spider identification and recording skills today.

I had a query today from someone who wants to use QGIS to show distribution maps of butterflies and moths for the Dordogne region of France. His question was about presenting a detailed background. Sourcing and creating map layers to build good looking backgrounds for distribution maps is probably one of the major hurdles for biological recorders wishing to use GIS to create distribution maps. To help answer his question I had a go at it myself and I thought it worth sharing what I found.

Some of the most memorable media images of 2015 came from NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto. Although the images of Pluto were spectacular, those that really stuck in my memory were those of the scientists themselves as they watched the images appear on their monitors, beamed back to earth by New Horizons over 3 billion miles of intervening space. Just before Christmas 2015, my friend Ben and I were treated to some views of a springtail, Orchesella villosa, under a Scanning Electron Microscope by Thom Dallimore at Edge Hill University: it was our Pluto moment.

The Tom.bio earthworm multi-access key lets me access the knowlege-based of Emma Sherlock's AIDGAP key in a way that puts me in charge of the identification process. But one of the advantages of multi-access keys - dealing with uncertainty - was not very well realised in version 1 of our key. Version 2 does a much better job of dealing with uncertainty - sorting and ranking species in a much more powerful way and making for a much improved multi-access key.

Ever noticed how so many microscopes seem to be called SX something or other? No? Maybe it's just the really sexy ones. Yes, I expect that's the technical reason for the SX moniker. According to the excellent website History of the Microscope, it is widely held that Dutch spectacle makers Hans & Zacharias Jansen (a father and son team) made the first optical microscope. But ask any biologist and they will tell you that it was the publication of Robert Hooke's Micrographia that made microscopy really sexy.

Like many UK naturalists at this time of year, last weekend I was busy playing my part as a volunteer - a citizen scientist if you like - monitoring the UK's biodiversity. I was square bashing - continuing an annual ritual of participation in the Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) and starting something new by surveying, for the first time, a square for the National Plant Monitoring Scheme (NPMS).